Bottle Label Inspiration
Q: What’s great about brewing your own beer?
A: You get to design a label for it.
Q: What’s great about designing a beer label?
A: It’s an excuse to visit The Dieline for some inspiration! (Somehow a quick trip here always turns into hours of happy browsing…)
A sampling:
- Why not turn “BYOB” into BYO Label?
- This 3D rum label appeals to both geeks & pirates
- I would love to find this holiday edition beer under my Christmas tree
- Creative “medal” metaphor: Virtuous Ales
- Beautiful illustration on Cerveceria Hacienda, from Pachuca Mexico
- I won’t be making any beer business cards, but this is a neat concept by Ampro Design
Enjoy! I’ll post pictures if I ever stop reading The Dieline long enough to design my own label.
Fonts In Use – Type at work in the real world.
Great website for typography inspiration. It has photos of “real world” examples of typography in use, categorized by industry, format, and typeface.
Good Help Content Improves the User Experience
From the MailChimp blog, some tips about creating great help content to improve your customer experience. It also includes a few tips around improving help content SEO:
Get used to repeating the names of your features over and over and avoid pronouns when writing out steps. This will help your search results as well.
UX Movement Blog
Just stumbled across this blog… lots of nice design patterns, including some that are fairly new (such as infinite scrolling).
Kinect Gestural UI (Jakob Nielsen)
Nielsen reviews the Kinect from a user experience standpoint.
By the way, if you haven’t experienced the Kinect yet, go take it for a test drive. Although it’s not 100% perfect, the gestural interaction and user experience are quite impressive and worth exploring.
The Top Six Innovation Ideas of 2011
Contests, interactive content, innovation labs, promotions… it all comes back to interaction design for a truly connected society.
The Top iPhone & iPad Apps of the Year
I’m not really surprised by any of these, but it is interesting to see that the top 10s include a mix of productivity and recreational apps.
Best Time to Publish Blog Posts
Visualization of view/link/comment activity throughout the week. As you might expect, activity peaks around lunch time. Interesting that views are lighter on the weekend, but comments are much heavier.
A Study of Trends in Mobile Design
An excerpt from a Smashing Magazine book about mobile design. Topics are a mix of technical (TLD usage, code validation, load time), visual design (typography, contrast), and interaction design (navigation, link click region, scrolling). Worth reading to get a quick snapshot of mobile design patterns as they exist today.
Tailoring communication to improve customer support
Customer support calls are opportunities to create great user experiences.
They often don’t end up that way. Long wait times, complicated menu systems, and rep juggling can be frustrating. Yet more and more we’re hearing about companies like Zappos that distinguish themselves through their excellent customer support. Nailing the customer experience when when a user is most upset can transform them from the biggest critic to the strongest promoter.
eLoyalty offers systems to help companies to improve their customer support experiences. When a user calls the customer support line, the system uses the Process Communication Model to determine the caller’s communication style. It alerts the agent, who can then adjust their own communication style in order to best help the user. For example, if a fact-focused “Workaholic” calls, an agent can get straight to the point and give them the information they need. If an emotional “Reactor” calls, the agent knows to connect with them on a personal level before trying to solve their problem.
The numbers are pretty impressive:
A banking client saw the attrition rate among customers struggling with the most serious issues drop from 7% to 1%. Another client using the system saw their J.D. Power rating rise from the high single digits to the low single digits (in the J.D. Power system, one is best). And according to Wesbecher, call center operation costs drop as much as 15% in the first year to 18 months that clients use the eLoyalty system.
This speaks to the value of tailoring support experiences to users’ preferences and emotional needs.
How else can we detect and design for individual preferences?
Persuasion & the Dark Side of design
By understanding how people make decisions, we can design to influence their behavior. Check out this article by Smashing Magazine about designing with cognitive bias in mind. Also, make sure to read Dan Ariely’s fascinating (& fun) book Predictably Irrational if you haven’t already.
Persuasive design can certainly be a good thing. Since interaction design often helps users to make decisions that lead to accomplishing their goals, a persuasive nudge can be both helpful and welcome.
But as any design superhero knows, “with great power comes great responsibility.” What happens when you consciously choose to not do right by your users? To trick, mislead, or take advantage of them?
Harry Brignull gave a presentation about Dark Patterns, which are design patterns that take advantage of people in a less-than-positive way. See the Dark Patterns Wiki for a list of malicious design patterns. Unfortunately, they are far too familiar. A few examples: asking trick questions, creating friend spam, and (I love the name of this one) privacy Zuckering.
When you realize that psychology & design enable you to influence people, what will you choose to do with that power?
Chroma-Hash Demo
A clever mashup of security & dataviz. Try making up a username, then type something in the “password” field and watch the chromahash bloom.
Read the creator’s blog to learn more about how this could be useful. I love the idea of turning this into an anti-phishing mechanism:
Let’s say you go to a site that you think is PayPal. If you start to type your password and you’re getting unfamiliar colors (or no colors show up at all, for that matter), you’ll know something’s fishy.
Carbonmade : Your online portfolio.
Beautiful website for Carbonmade, an online portfolio creation system. I haven’t even signed up for the service and I’m already in love.
Also, there is plenty more to be inspired by in the examples section.
BookPig - Netflix for Kids Books
What a great idea! Kids can go online to select which books they want to read, then receive them in the mail.
This is convenient for parents because they don’t have to fit library trips into their busy schedules, worry about overdue fines, or figure out what to do with outgrown books.
It’s also great for kids because they can read and reread books at their leisure, while continuing to discover new favorites. Maybe it will even get more kids excited about reading. Can you imagine the joy of getting a fresh batch of books in the mail? Turning books into presents– now that is a great idea.
I worry about libraries becoming a thing of the past, but hopefully BookPig can keep a love for reading alive.
Business Phone shortcuts
I usually hate calling customer service because I can never figure out which buttons to press or what to say to get a human on the line.
GetHuman solves that problem by listing the shortcuts for many different customer service help phone lines. I just tried it out for United Airlines (after getting fed up with the help website & the phone menu) and it absolutely worked! The secret: keep dialing 0 at each of the prompts. I was immediately connected with a customer service rep and had my problem solved in <1 minute.
Facebook | Introducing Deals
I was wondering how long it would take Facebook to start offering something like Deals. They already have a history of taking winning concepts from other startups, repackaging for FB, then getting people who aren’t traditionally “early adopters” to start using them.
Twitter > FB Status Updates
Youtube > FB Videos
Quora > FB Questions
Foursquare > FB Locations
Foursquare/Groupon > FB Deals
It’s a clever strategy for Facebook– they already know what people like/don’t like about the concept without having to take the risks on their own. Also, they don’t have to worry about the sparse user problem. And they know that early adopters have been looking for a way to get their more conservative friends to join them in this “cool endeavor”.
Well played, Facebook. But social startup, what’s your plan for when FB sees you as competition?
iPad: Scroll or Card?
Scroll Model vs. Card Model
Interaction: Swiping requires a big gesture, scrolling is a small gesture. Using big gestures for big actions (next article) and small gestures for small actions (continue in article) corresponds to the weight of the action, similar gestures for differently weighted actions are unintuitive.
UX and Startups
Great perspective on how a UX pro can give a lean startup a leg up. Also, tips for choosing the right startup to work with.